E3 2014: The Evil Within Lets Death Become You

Death is a way of life in Bethesda's new survival horror game from the mind of Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami. While most of the attention this gore-fest has garnered has been all about how scary it is - and even hownot scary it is - the one thing you should know is this: you're going to die...a lot. And badly, too.

Okay, death in a survival horror game isn't any great surprise. After all, that's to be expected in a storyline that sees playable hero Detective Sebastian Castellanos drowned by a river of blood in a hallway. Or was he? The Evil Within slips between reality and hallucination so often that you feel constantly off-kilter about what's actually happening and what's just a supernatural mind-trick.

So how many ways are there to die in The Evil Within? Well, in my 20-minute hands-on play session, I had a pickaxe lodged in my chest, was strangled and bit, had my skull crushed by a hulking ghoul's meaty foot, and got blown to bits by a tripwire bomb. Do I just suck at survival horror games? That's entirely possible. But given that the creatures are so impervious to harm that some shrug off headshots and can only be permanently subdued by immolating them when they're down, cut me some slack for dying a few times when unceremoniously dumped into a kill room teeming with shambling corpses.

Dying is all part of the learning curve, though. Especially in discovering traps and deciding whether you should disable them or use them against your enemies. In the aforementioned kill room, you're locked inside by a hooded ghost lady who calls upon traveling droplets of her own blood to rejuvenate a motley crew of blood-drenched, mutilated humanoids. Faster than you can say "fresh meat," they embark on a slow but steady chase to add you to their necrotic ranks. Like most survival horrors, keeping your distance and not leaping into the fray is the key to survival here. The large knife and pistol you're armed with are more for stunning a target temporarily so you can flee than they are offensive tools. Sure, a bullet in the noggin may put down a creature long enough for you to burn them, but ammunition is extremely limited. And the knife? I could almost hear monsters chuckling as they overpowered me after a couple swipes of the blade.

It turns out that learning your environment is the key to taking down large groups. As mentioned, you can leave tripwire bombs active and either shoot them with your pistol or lure creatures into triggering them. Numerous hand switches litter the area, which can trigger innocuous results like a statue falling down a chute or, more germane to the situation at hand, activate a deadly rain of bullets that perforate anything in their path.

So is The Evil Within scary? It's certainly disturbing and spooky, but no, I never experienced anything that made me jump or shriek in horror. Then again, I was only playing one short sequence of a much longer game. What's most notable is how much it borrows from its predecessors in the genre, specifically Resident Evil (which, given the game's pedigree, is also not a surprise.) Even the montage sequence shown to the press before our hands-on featured not one but two monsters slowly looking back at you over their left shoulder.

One of those borrowed effects is a film grain overlay. You know something is up when you're warned ahead of time that the effect is an intentional choice by the creator. Basically, they're saying "don't worry, it's supposed to look like that." Sure enough, even though I was playing on a PS4, the film grain degraded the visuals so much that I would have guessed I was playing on last-generation hardware. Grainy, distorted ambiance and survival horror go together like dank asylum walls and fleshy pulsating membranes, yet the result left me wondering where my fancy new graphics are.